All posts tagged: exhibition

The creation of a dummy is an integral process for any photographer with aims on publishing their own photobook. It is a visual mockup for a proposed project, created before being sent to the publishers. Organised by La Fábrica in collaboration with Photo London, the Book Dummy Award selects a entry that is renowned for its quality, uniqueness and international scope, the winners of the award will then have their dummy physically realised. The competition encourages photographers from anywhere in the world to submit a physical copy of their dummy, under the rule that no digital copies may be entered. One winner from 20 finalist dummies will then be selected by an international jury. The winner’s work will be published with a print run of at least 1000 copies, and distributed worldwide. Photographers submit entries from all over the world, as in 2017 there were participants from 45 countries and every continent. The winner of the 2017 edition was Iranian-born, Swiss photographer Arunà Canevascini. Nominated as one of British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch …

Last week, a group of Croatia’s leading cultural pioneers welcomed the 10th jubilee edition of Organ Vida photofestival. Co-curators, Marina Paulenka and Lea Vene were joined by Nataša Ivančević, Paola Orlić, Morana Matković, Nevena Tudor Perković and Veljko Mihalić to address visitors and guests at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb for the grand opening, getting the festival underway for the tenth consecutive year. The opening of the festival signalled the announcement of the second annual Marina Viculin prize to photographer Denis Butorac. Using personal experience as a driving force behind his work, he focuses on family, intimacy and the sense of ‘(not) belonging’. Following the opening week, the exhibitions are now open to the public, free of charge, during the month of September. Hosted by a number of galleries throughout Zagreb as well as in the Croatia’s biggest and most modern museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the works on display explore creative interpretations of the contemporary female experience. Each show follows the main theme, borne out of a desire to combat modern …

It began in March 2015 when David Yates, a client of photographer and fine art printer Mike Crawford, turned up at his print studio, Lighthouse Darkroom, with a “shopping trolleyful” of old boxes of expired photographic paper. The next day, he brought another. The two loads were what was left of a mass clear-out of Yates’ late grandfather Bret Sampson’s darkroom. The British photographer’s London studio was his first port of call, given that Crawford was already working with Yates on another of his personal projects.

In October 2017, Oliver Chanarin, a photographer professor at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, printed an archival photograph onto cardboard in his office, and left it on display for his job share partner Adam Broomberg. The next week, his colleague printed an image on top of the photograph. This exchange happened several times, ultimately creating unprompted photomontages. “I left a sample for Adam, as a little gift,” says Chanarin, who was born in London but grew up in South Africa as a child to South African parents. “That’s how it began; as a conversation in images printed on cardboard.”

“Hosting OpenWalls is an exciting opportunity to create an outstanding curated exhibition in an unusual setting,” says Julia de Bierre, who is opening up the walls of her internationally renowned gallery, Galerie Huit Arles, to exhibit 50 shortlisted images for a month in July 2019. Launching to coincide with the 50th edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles, the world’s first and foremost photographic festival, OpenWalls is an awards initiative that gives emerging and established photographers the chance to exhibit in reputable locations around the world. For our first exhibition we are inviting work responding to the theme ‘Home & Away’, with the aim being to capture a sense of belonging, escapism, or identity. “I hope that the response to the theme will reflect all the qualities, and possibly contradictions, of British Journal of Photography’s readership,” says Julia. Which are? “Talented, informed, curious, conventional, cutting-edge, international or home-grown, and numerous!” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Galerie Huit Arles is located in the centre of Arles. Once used as a remarkable 17th century mansion, its classical …

A private view may generate new interest and even lead to prospective buyers, but how do you get people to attend your exhibition in the first place? Primarily, it is important to think carefully about how you promote your show. Even if you think you have perfected every detail, without effective promotion it can be difficult for your exhibition to gain the attention it deserves. For this article, British Journal of Photography interviewed Nick Thompson, who is part of the marketing and exhibitions team at theprintspace, and Gemma Peppé, director of Art on a Postcard, to hear their thoughts on the most successful ways to promote an exhibition. theprintspace is the UK’s leading photographic and fine art printers, who also host numerous exhibitions throughout the year at their East London gallery. Thompson is a photographer himself, and has produced a number of exhibitions of his own work. What are some of the best ways to go about promoting your show if you’re an early-career photographer? Nick Thompson: Post about it on your social media platforms. …

When she was a teenager, Ohio-based artist Carmen Winant discovered a collection of photo albums filled with pictures of her mother giving birth to her three children. “It was an amazing and slightly terrifying feeling to witness myself being born [in 1983],” she recalls. In 2016, Winant became a mother herself, and noticing a lack of visual work about the experience of giving birth, was moved to produce her own series. “Though it is so common, there is nothing normal about birth,” she says. “I wanted to create a visual, pictorial language that might contribute towards a greater, and more nuanced, understanding.” The resulting installation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) and the coinciding book, My Birth, incorporate her mother’s photographs of herself giving birth and found imagery of anonymous women undergoing the same experience, as well as a written piece by Winant exploring the shared yet solitary ownership of the experience of birth. Presented chronologically, the images trace the process of labour and birth from the earliest contractions to the breastfeeding of …

On the face of it, Thomas Ruff has radically altered course since his first major series brought him to international fame in the mid-1980s. He followed his portraits of fellow students at the Düsseldorf Art Academy (where he was studying photography with the legendary Bernd and Hilla Becher) with photographs of modern architecture in the 1987-1991 series Hauser, and then began working with appropriated images. His 1989 series, Sterne, used astronomical panoramas from the European Southern Observatory, for example, while his Zeitungsfotos made during the 1990s took images culled from newspapers. Over the following decade he has continued working with the vernacular, incorporating source material such as manga comics which he manipulated into colourful abstractions (Substrat), highly pixellated images he downloaded from the internet (Jpegs), and an archive of glass negatives found in a factory archive from the 1930s and 40s (Machines). But while Ruff is happy to admit his techniques change from series to series, the concept behind his work has remained consistent. In an interview for his latest catalogue he told Hans Ulrich …

“The exhibition just becomes this transition point. There will be new artwork created by the exhibition. I think that’s exciting: it means it becomes alive. These often tragic stories will continue living in other forms, whether through painting or through music, so it’s about making the exhibition a place of life and a celebration of that life,” says Giles Duley, the photographer who has spent months travelling Europe and the Middle East to document the refugee crisis with UNHCR. Taking images from his photobook, I Can Only Tell You What I See, the display will feature artists in residence, a soundscape from Massive Attack and will host an evening supper so as visitors can sit and discuss the work and the wider problems surrounding the refugee crisis.

Tate was famously slow to institutionalise photography, staging its first photography show (Cruel + Tender: The real in the 20th century photography) in 2003, and appointing its first photography curator, Simon Baker, in 2009. Now, hot on the heels of its acquisition of Martin Parr’s 12,000-strong photobook collection, its now made another major commitment to photography, appointing Kate Bush in the new post of Adjunct Curator of Photography. Bush, who was previously Head of Photography at the Science Museum Group, and prior to that Head of Art Galleries at the Barbican Centre in London, starts at Tate Britain in October.